Look Up to See Billions of Years Into the Past

We can see seconds, minutes, hours, and years into the past with our own eyes.

Our senses are stuck in the past. There’s a flash of lightning, and then seconds pass until we hear the rumble of distant thunder. We hear the past.

We are seeing into the past, too.

While sound travels about a kilometer every three seconds, light travels 300,000 kilometers every second. When we see a flash of lighting three kilometers away, we are seeing something that happened a hundredth of a millisecond ago. That’s not exactly the distant past.

But as we look further afield, we can peer further back. We can see seconds, minutes, hours, and years into the past with our own eyes. Looking through a telescope, we can look even further into the past.

A Second Back in Time

If you really want to look back in time, you need to look up.

When we look at the moon, we are seeing it as it was just over a second ago.

The moon is our nearest celestial neighbor — a world with valleys, mountains, and craters.

It’s also about 380,000km away, so it takes 1.3 seconds for light to travel from the moon to us. We see the moon not as it is, but as it was 1.3 seconds ago.

The moon doesn’t change much from instant to instant, but this 1.3-second delay is perceptible when mission control talks to astronauts on the moon. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so a message from mission control takes 1.3 seconds to get to the moon, and even the quickest of replies takes another 1.3 seconds to come back.

Radio communications to the Moon have a perceptible time delay.

Minutes and Hours

It’s not hard to look beyond the moon and further back in time. The sun is about 150 million km away, so we see it as it was about eight minutes ago.

Even our nearest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, are tens of millions of kilometers away, so we see them as they were minutes ago. When Mars is very close to Earth, we are seeing it as it was about three minutes ago, but at other times light takes more than 20 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth.

The light travel time from Mars to Earth changes as the distance to Mars changes.

This presents some problems if you’re on Earth controlling a Rover on Mars. If you’re driving the Rover at 1km per hour, then the lag, due to the finite speed of light, means the rover could be 200 meters ahead of where you see it, and it could travel another 200 meters after you command it to hit the brakes.

Years

The night sky is full of stars, and those stars are incredibly distant. The distances are measured in light-years, which corresponds to the distance traveled by light in one year. That’s about 9 trillion km.

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star visible to the unaided eye, is at a distance 270,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. That’s four light-years, so we see Alpha Centauri as it was four years ago.

Some of the brightest stars in the sky are hundreds of light-years away.

Some bright stars are much more distant still. Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, is about 640 light-years away. If Betelgeuse exploded tomorrow (and it will explode one day), we wouldn’t know about it for centuries.

Even without a telescope, we can see much, much further. The Andromeda galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds are relatively nearby galaxies that are bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.

The Large Magellanic cloud is a mere 160,000 light-years away, while Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. For comparison, modern humans have only walked the Earth for about 300,000 years.

Billions

With the unaided eye, you can look millions of years into the past, but how about billions? Well, you can do that at the eyepiece of an amateur telescope.

3C 273 can be seen with a small telescope despite being billions of light years away.

Quasar 3C 273 is an incredibly luminous object, which is brighter than individual galaxies, and powered by a huge black hole.

But it’s 1,000 times fainter than what the unaided eye can see because it’s 2.5 billion light-years away. That said, you can spot it with a 20cm aperture telescope.

A bigger telescope allows you to peer even further into space, and I once had the pleasure of using an eyepiece on a 1.5-meter diameter telescope. Quasar APM 08279+5255 was just a faint dot, which isn’t surprising as it’s 12 billion light-years away.

Earth is just 4.5 billion years old, and even the universe itself is 13.8 billion years old. Relatively few people have seen APM 08279+5255 with their own eyes, and in doing so they (and I) have looked back across almost the entire history of our universe.

With a big enough telescope you can see quasar APM 08279+5255 and look 12 billion years back in time.

So when you look up, remember you aren’t seeing things as they are now; you’re seeing things as they were.

Without really trying, you can see years into the past. And with the aid of a telescope, you can see millions or even billions of years into the past with your very own eyes.